Gain The Second Kind Of Impossible: The Extraordinary Quest For A New Form Of Matter Conveyed By Paul J. Steinhardt Represented In E-Text
Paul Steinhardt hypothesized a new form of matter previously considered impossible under the laws of crystallography which had stood for aboutyears, This impossible material he would soon call "quasicrystals, " Among the many initial naysayers was his mentor, the famous physicist Richard Feynman, But as Steinhardt relates:
", . . 'impossible,' when used by Feynman, did not necessarily mean 'unachievable,' or 'ridiculous, ' Sometimes it meant, 'Wow! Here is something amazing that contradicts what we would normally expect to be true, This is worth understanding!'"
Evidently, this is the "second kind of impossible" which Steinhardt elucidates later in the book, The first kind refers to undeniable impossibilities things like violating the law of conservation of energy, making a perpetual motion machine, squaring the circle, and the argument thatandcan make.
These are intrinsically impossible and no advances in knowledge will ever change that, The second kind of impossible is like the statement "there's no way the Big Bang is true the Steady State model of the universe is far more sound!" In other words, some ideas are impossible under a certain set of assumptions which may be unanimously believed, even by credible scientists.
But these assumptions may be wrong, And this, Steinhardt claimed, was the case with “quasicrystals,” the existence of which, if proved, would fundamentally alter our understanding of the laws of nature, Working with his graduate student Dov Levine, Steinhardt soon became convinced that not only could this new kind of matter be made in a lab but may yet be discovered in nature.
And so they tried, in a quest which tookyears and would lead Steinhardt and a small team of scientists to the remote wilderness of Eastern Russia in a peninsula called Kamchatka.
They were met with much resistance along the way, of course, The wheels of science turn slowly, But the opposition is part of the process, In fact, Steinhardt details how he kept his fiercest critics close to prevent confirmation bias on his end, His respect for the scientific enterprise is palpable and unsurprising coming from a student of Feynman indeed, Steinhardt cites Feynman's famous speech, "Cargo Cult Science," while describing his own efforts to prevent selfdeception.
This effort makes his final triumphs wellearned, and very interesting to read about despite me knowing nothing about crystallography beyond what this book told me,
And this book explained it all well enough that I understood why the "impossible" discovery was so revolutionary, The initial chapters are understandably heavy with exposition, Stick with it the The Second Kind of Impossible's second half especially reads like an adventure story, It'll be a while before I pick up another book on crystallography, When I do, I'll credit The Second Kind of Impossible for my interest, Who would think a book on crystallography and icosahedrons could be made interesting, especially for this high school physics failure Yet, Mr, Steinhardt has created an extremely interesting read,
This work is really a scientific adventure story, melding the creative process with application of logic with hard data ultimately obtained through field work on the mosquitoinfested Kamchatka Peninsula, of all places.
Mr. Steinhardt does a remarkable job of bridging the world of theoretical physics with the vernacular of ordinary, everyday advanced degree recipients as for the mere college graduate, I cannot say.
I did put this book down noticing that Mr, Steinhardt lives a life far removed from the daily cares and concerns of the billions on our planet, He devotes intense dedication and resources into the investigation of an arcane subject that may be of questionable value to anyone, Are his efforts acts of scientific heroism or examples of a larger problem, the seeming further isolation of science from humanity
I very much liked the fact that Mr.
Steinhardt named names, the institutions and individuals that both helped and hindered his efforts, I recommend this book as an excellent example of the scientific process in action and commend Mr, Steinhardt for the quality of his narrative, I'm delighted by this book, The story is wellwritten and engaging, It's entertaining and informative, and it artfully balances technical and nontechnical jargon, making the story accessible to everyone, So what if you thought up an offthewall idea when you were a kid, and then you kept working on it as a college student, and as an adult You might achieve the impossible, or at least, the second kind of impossible.
Author Paul J. Steinhardt proposes that there are two kinds of impossible, The first kind of impossible claim is when a proposal would violate the basic laws of physics, The second kind of impossible is impossible under most circumstances, but in challenging our assumptions we find what's possible under very specific conditions,
It has been commonly assumed that only certain regular shapes can completely tile a floor, or fill a threedimensional space, Things like squares and cubes, rectangles, diamonds, and hexagons, Shapes with five or seven sides cannot possibly tile a floor, or fill a box, Roger Penrose found a tiling pattern that worked if you added two more shapes, Could Steinhardt's team find an example of a reallife Penrose tiling pattern in nature
Follow the exciting quest to find a new form of matter, dubbed the quasicrystal, Note: There is some gorgeous geometric art in this book! Summary: A narrative of the search for a new form of matter, first theorized, then synthesized, and then first found in a mineral collection of questionable provenance that gave tantalizing hints that it might really exist.
This is a real science detective story, It has all the hopeful leads and unsettling reverses of a detective mystery, and one where the lead character, in this case the lead researcher, finds himself in a situation far removed from the normal environs of a theoretical physicist.
It begins with the question of whether an impossible fivefold symmetry could be possible under some circumstance, Then Paul Steinhardt, and a graduate student, Dov Levine, began began looking for a loophole to the forbidden fivefold symmetry, and found it, suggesting the possibility for something they termed quasicrystals.
Meanwhile, in another lab, a researcher synthesized a compound that turned out to have the predicted electron diffraction pattern, It takes the two labs a couple years to find out about each other but it demonstrates that something that seems impossible can actually exist, hence the title of this book, coming from Richard Feynman's response to a paper by Steinhardt, who had been mentored by him.
It was the kind of impossible that defies known knowledge but has an intriguing logic to it,
The next phase of Steinhardt's research was to discover whether such a quasicrystal actually exists in naturethe quest for a needle in a haystack as it were.
He and a student comb mineral collections around the world, looking for promising diffraction patterns, They strike out over and over again until they find one sample in an Italian mineral collection administered by Luca Bindi, Part two of this book describes all the tests to confirm that this tiny sample indeed has a quasicrystal imbedded in it and all the arguments against it.
Then another sample is discovered in Russia, but the scientist, a Russian official, will not share it except for an exorbitant price, Furthermore, questions arise about both samples and their provenanceuntil the field researcher who actually found the material is discovered and agrees to help them find the tiny stream and collect additional samples.
The third part of the book is the trip to this stream, in a remote part of the Kamchatka Peninsula, Steinhardt, who has never done this kind of field work, is leader of the team, and against all the improbabilities, the challenges of mosquitoes, weather, bears, and the terrain, they find additional samples, leading to discoveries of other quasicrystals, and clues to how this material was formed.
One of the fascinating qualities of this book was the quest that started with a theoretical question and eventually led to a remote peninsula of Kamchatka.
For those not acquainted with the life of a research scientist, this account captures something of the excitement of pursuing a really interesting research question, how one question can lead to another, and the roadblocks and dead ends researchers sometimes encounter along the way.
What we realize eventually is that all this takes over thirty years, and involves collaboration with a number of researchers from Russia, Italy, and all over the U.
S. It is not the only research Steinhardt works on, but imagine spending most of one's adult working life pursuing a research question, The combination of curiosity and sheer perseverance commands a certain kind of respect,
The other fascinating aspect of this book was understanding how research science works, Richard Feynman is not the only one to declare "impossible, " Some did so with outright opposition for good scientific reasons, This happens constantly in the submission of research papers and at scientific conferences, Steinhardt enlists his opponents on his research team, forming a "red team" and a "blue team" with opposing views, The opposing teams were good at recommending all the tests
that would eliminate alternative possibilities, Eventually the opposition, formidable researchers in their own right, are convincedbut that took years,
This is a good book to illustrate the skepticism, the meticulous rigor, and the selfcorrecting character of scientific research at its best, The other wonderful aspect that arises out of this process is the international collaboration of people willing to share knowledge, samples, and credit, to advance a shared understanding of the world, indeed the universe.
In short, this is a great book to see how science really works at its best, .